Grammy Award-winning, Chicago-based percussion quartet Third Coast Percussion teams up with influential, genre-defying multi-instrumentalist, record producer, songwriter, singer, and composer Devonté Hynes (aka Blood Orange) for an album of imaginative, evocative instrumental music originally created as the live soundtrack for choreography by the adventurous Hubbard Street Dance Chicago company.
Although he is now known primarily as a singer, songwriter, and producer in the pop music world, classical music was the first music Devonté Hynes knew. The three works on this album, all world-premiere recordings, represent Hynes’s debut on disc as a classical composer. Hynes says of Fields: “It’s the first time I’ve written music that I’ve never played, and I love that. It’s something I’ve always been striving to get to. Seeing what Third Coast Percussion had done with these pieces was magical.”
Philip Glass came of age as a musician at the same time the percussion ensemble was first emerging in the concert hall. And though Glass has used percussion instruments extensively in his operas and orchestral works, it took a commission from Grammy Award-winners Third Coast Percussion to produce his first work for percussion ensemble.
This new work, Perpetulum, is featured on Third Coast Percussion’s latest album and lends its title to the album as well. In addition, ensemble members Robert Dillon and Peter Martin each contributed works which TCP has toured extensively already, ensemble member David Skidmore contributed a multi-movement electro-acoustic work (Aliens with Extraordinary Abilities), and a new work by Gavin Bryars is featured, also commissioned by Third Coast Percussion.
After their 2017 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, Third Coast Percussion returns to Cedille Records with an album inspired by the classic children’s book and film “Paddle to the Sea.” This album includes music collaboratively composed by the four members of Third Coast Percussion as an updated sound track for the film, as well as the other water-themed works that provided inspiration to the quartet as they composed this music. These include works by American composers Philip Glass (arranged by Third Coast Percussion) and Jacob Druckman, as well as music from Zimbabwe’s Shona people, shaped by Third Coast Percussion under the tutelage of master mbira player Musekiwa Chingodza.
Sheet music for Third Coast Percussion’s arrangements of Philip Glass’s Aguas da Amazonia can be purchased from Hal-Leonard (US), Musicroom (UK), and MusicshopEurope (EU).
For percussionists, who are perpetually balancing logistical challenges with artistic ambitions, the music of Philippe Manoury is a high stakes proposition. The visionary works on this album require an immense variety of resources. Three of these tracks are scored for Sixxen, a set of six instruments which must be built from scratch. The rest of the album is scored for marimbas, a vibraphone, and large, chromatically tuned Thai gongs.
The works on this album are remarkable musical statements—nothing else written before or since sounds quite like this music. Manoury creates unimaginable sound worlds, drawing on his long history of composing electronic music to inspire the sounds of these purely acoustic works. Despite all the challenges of logistics and execution, this music achieves incredible clarity, evocative textures, and intriguing colors.
Our hope is that this album – over 6 years in the making – will bring this unique and brilliant music to more ears, and inspire more percussionists to find opportunities to take on the exhilarating challenge of bringing this music to life.
This album features iconic percussion works by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Steve Reich, whom The Village Voice deemed, “America’s greatest living composer.” Reich’s music has influenced artists ranging from art-pop and rock musicians Brian Eno and David Bowie to composers John Adams and Bang on a Can co-founders Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe.
While most composers now welcome our instruments on the concert stage, only a few have shown audiences how percussion can be absolutely essential. The rhythmic drive, articulated melody, and perpetual cycle of Reich’s music seems to have marimbas and vibraphones in its very DNA, just as John Cage’s music feels unimaginable without drums, tin cans, and an endless variety of noise makers.
Works featured on the album include Mallet Quartet, Sextet, Nagoya Marimbas, and Music for Pieces of Wood.
Click here to listen to the WNYC New Sounds episode featuring the album.
The work of American composer David T. Little does not shy away from difficult topics. Whether it’s in his operas (a recent commission came from the Metropolitan Opera’s MET/LCT new works program) or with his Orwell-inspired ensemble Newspeak, Little uses the juxtaposition of blunt force and subtle textures to explore themes of power, truth, corruption, and desperation.
David T. Little’s new album, Haunt of Last Nightfall, is available on New Amsterdam Records. Performed and commissioned by acclaimed ensemble, Third Coast Percussion, the piece looks to a tragic moment in El Salvadoran history, the massacre at El Mozote, El Salvador in December 1981.
Of the piece, Little says, “I think a lot about ghosts…of things that remain behind as the fleeting evidence of what once was. Since reading about El Mozote, I have been unable to get it out of my mind: how this village, innocent by virtually every account, was wiped out. Caught in the crossfire of a stupid ideological battle, its people now ghosts. What we know shapes us, and whether I like it or not, I now know this.”
Bells can be used to celebrate grand occasions, hold sacrificial rites, keep a record of events, give the correct time, celebrate births and weddings, mark funerals, caution a community, enhance any number of religious ceremonies, and are even hung around the necks of animals. Bells are central to the music of composer Augusta Read Thomas, who is among the most sought-after composers working today.
Written in 2012, Resounding Earth is scored for nearly three hundred unique bells and other resonant metal objects. The composition of the work, and the selection of the specific bells used in the recording, was completed in close collaboration between Thomas and Third Coast Percussion.
The album is available as an audio CD, and as a DVD with complete audio/visual of the work.
This album offers performances of works from John Cage’s early life with a “special fluency and zest that sets them apart” (Guardian). It was during this time that Cage met and studied with Arnold Schoenberg and Henry Cowell, worked with Lou Harrison, and found inspiration in Oskar Fischinger’s dictum that “everything in the world has a spirit that can be released through its sound.”
Throughout the recording process we worked closely with Cage’s manuscripts and personal correspondence, made available through the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Northwestern University Music Library, and the John Cage Trust’s founding trustee and Executive Director Laura Kuhn.
The album is available as an audio CD, and as a DVD with complete audio/visual of each work.
Third Coast Percussion’s second full-length album, “Unknown Symmetry,” describes a very personal history of the Chicago-based ensemble from their founding in 2005 to today. The album includes the first recording of the percussion quartet arrangement of Arvo Pärt’s iconic work, Fratres; beautiful, rarely-heard works by Peter Garland and Christopher Deane, and new music from Third Coast Percussion’s own David Skidmore and former member of TCP, Owen Clayton Condon.
Skidmore’s multi-movement work, “Common Patterns in Uncommon Time,” was commissioned for the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and architectural studio in rural Wisconsin.
The album is available as an audio CD, and as a DVD with complete audio/visual of each work.
Click here to read more about the 8 year-process of making this album.
Our debut EP, Ritual Music, features highlights from our first few seasons of concerts, including New York superstar composers Nico Muhly’s Ta and Clap, the beautiful marimba chorale Twilight by Swedish composer Tobias Brostrom, and 2 pieces by Third Coast members: Clay Condon’s Double Helix and David Skidmore’s Ritual Music.
